Currently, a number of different technologies seek to provide the benefits of the Internet, and the World Wide Web in particular, to users any time and anywhere they desire it through wireless technologies. However, both the wireless devices used to access the Internet and the networks which carry information to those devices have limitations.
Wireless devices are significantly smaller and less powerful than desktop or laptop devices which provide more conventional access to the World Wide Web via a web browser. The wireless networks which connect these devices to the Internet do not have the same bandwidth as land-based “wire line” systems, and provide this limited bandwidth at a higher cost, more limited availability and lower quality of service when compared with land-based systems.
One wireless application solution which is gaining popularity is wireless application protocol (WAP). WAP is a standard for bringing together wireless telephones and Internet content services regardless of the wireless network architecture or device type. WAP is designed to work with any type of underlying wireless network architecture, thereby freeing the provider to concentrate on the wireless application itself. As shown in FIG. 1, the WAP model presupposes a WAP client 10, such as a cellular telephone or personal digital assistant (PDA), which is equipped with a micro browser. The WAP client 10 communicates directly with a server on the Internet 25 via a WAP gateway 20 as shown in FIG. 1. The WAP gateway server sits between a wireless carrier's network 15 on one side and the public Internet 25 on the other. (This configuration need not be limited to the public Internet, but may include private Intranets, so that gateways can be located within the carrier or corporate firewalls or both.) The WAP gateway 20 handles the interface between the two sets of network protocols, wireless WAP and wireline TCP/IP. The WAP gateway server decodes and decompresses wireless terminal requests and sends it on to the appropriate web server as an ordinary HTTP request.
Certain wireless carriers have already implemented WAP gateways. If a standard HTML document is served in response to an HTTP request from a WAP cleint 10, the WAP gateway server implements content translation before the request can be relayed back to the WAP client 10. The WAP gateway 20 also imposes data quantity limits on client responses. The gateway limitation means that for each given transaction, only a limited number of bytes may pass through the gateway. This so-called “gateway limit” defines the actual amount of data which may be returned in response to an HTTP request.
Generally, the WAP gateways impose some form of data limitation on the amount of data which is transmitted to the WAP client 10. In one case, the gateway limitation is at or about 1.5 Kbytes (or about 1492 bytes). Hence, this presents an additional problem to content providers to design pages and applications which can provide useful content and information to a WAP client 10.
In addition to bandwidth limitations, device limitations present issues to content providers. The small screens of wireless devices mean display area is at a premium. In particular, the available display area of a wireless phone is limited to 4-10 lines, making the display of large amounts of data difficult. One technique used to address this issue is to allow a user to scroll the display up and down the page displayed on the device, in order to allow more information to be accessible to the user at a given time. Yet another limitation of such devices is the limited input/output mechanisms of such devices. Cell phones are limited to a keypad and a few additional control buttons. Hand-held PDA devices have small keyboards or pen-based input which requires input controls be placed on the screen. Even where a PDA or in some cases a pager has a full keyboard (i.e. the Blackberry™ wireless pager developed by Research In Motion, Waterloo Ontario, Canada), the size of such input devices means such input devices are not as functional as full-size keyboards.
In other types of devices where only a limited input mechanism is available, data organization and function mapping to limited inputs are known. For example, the mapping of letters of the alphabet to keypad numbers to input alphabetic characters into phone memory in, for example, cell phones is well known. Mapping other input functions to a device's limited input keys is known as well.
For example, the Startac® organizer manufactured by Motorola, Inc. is a PDA device which is designed to clip onto a cellular phone and interact with the phone. The organizer contains contact, calendering and notes information, and because of its size it is limited to four input buttons.
Content information in the organizer is organized alphabetically by an alphabetical tag similar to a paper telephone address book, with each entry alphabetized in accordance with its rules of display in a “display name” field. The user may then select individual tabs using the control buttons which identify further levels of granularity in the alphabetization. For example, the opening screen lists a set of tabs, each tab containing three letters (e.g. “ABC,” “DEF,” etc.) representing the first letter of the last name of each contact. Selecting “ABC” yields another set of tabs with single letter entries (e.g. “A,” “B,” “C,” etc.) and selecting “A” yields all entries presented with the letter “A.” If a number of entries are provided for the letter A which exceeds the 10-line display of the device, the device will further sort entries into a pre-configured number of further levels of granularity, for example all entries between “A” and “AI,” “AR” and “AT,” etc. The organizer will sort, alphabetize, and granularize each letter of the alphabet depending on the number of contacts beginning with that letter. Selection of different controls occurs through use of one of the six control buttons on the device.